Alex Koplin is one of the veteran commenters on ISO50 blog, while he’s been working on graduating he’s also had time to work on a few collages and some free desktops for everyone. I talked to him over the phone before I posted this and he shared that Adrift by ISO50 was an influence on the work which I thought was a good choice always to look at before working mostly anything.

I’ve always been fascinated by collage. It’s a visceral technique that emerged in the early 20th century as a form of pop art, involving the assemblage of a variety of different sources of color and texture. Inspired by a few recent projects, I set out to experiment and develop my own technique for collage. These collage/number studies are the result of my first concerted effort, and I couldn’t be happier with the results. What excites me even more is the potential to apply this technique in future projects, using different color and texture palettes, and new layout techniques. I learned about how layout and order of placement dictate the motion and flow of the collage, which can be especially noted viewing the piece at a small size, or from far-away. It’s especially interesting to think about collage in this case as a digital approach to replicating a technique that traditionally relied on the physical sourcing, cutting and gluing of materials. The affordances of applications like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop, and the abundance of pixels to source from the internet allow us to replicate these processes without all the mess, but is this still giving us the experience of bonding with the materials as we combine and re-contextualize them to form something new, expressive, and ultimately our own? I can say I did get a taste of this feeling, but there is still a barrier that existed between me and this final result that beckons me to somehow bring this sort of technique into the material world.